Cobain Vocal Tracks

  • Thread starter Thread starter Illogical_Mind
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Illogical_Mind

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I was just listening to this vocal from "in bloom"

I like nirvana, just got my hands on acapellas and wanted to study how the pros do it. Since there is more knowledge here than I have I wanted to see if you can help me break it down.

Its really got a lot done to it. I know he wasn't really a great vocalist, but there is a ridiculous amount of effects on his voice, plus layers. Listen to the Chorus harmonies also. They seem so fake. I don't feel bad about my vocal work anymore lol. When I say he's not a great vocalist i'm thinking of his Demo work. Hilarious.

[Mod Note: Link removed. Please don't post copyrighted material that does not belong to you. per TOS]

Link will play when clicked, NOT a download link.

I just converted this to MP3, but have the original .OGG file if you want it.

Just wanted to open a discussion about His Studio Production.

Its really cool to see how Panned all the song parts are also. Drums especially. I would have never thought to pan drums the way this song is.
 
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Pretty cool, as much as he can't sing. Man, that's a lot of processing.

The "harmonies" do sound really fake, and I couldn't even tell you what about them makes them sound fake. Harmonizer maybe????
 
Actually, IIRC, Kurt had to be more or less tricked into doubling the vocals on Nevermind - Butch Vig would tell Kurt to "do one more" to get a better take, and accumulated a couple takes this way, and then pretty much left them all unmuted in the final mix. I want to say a lot of the scratch vocal tracks got used, too.

If nothing else, his live vocals on "Unplugged" were all spot on - you might not care for the guy's voice, but he could clearly sing.
 
#1 - You're going to get in trouble for that link. I'd edit it if I were you.

#2 - Don't confuse hitting a pitch with being a great vocalist. The man was one of the greatest vocalists I've ever heard.

#3 - The panning on Nevermind is very common.
 
kurts double tracking was very very tight.

that tells me that either he could sing well, or he could repeatedly sing something badly, in exactly the same way.


either way, that's more talent than i have! lol
 
Steenamaroo said:
kurts double tracking was very very tight.

that tells me that either he could sing well, or he could repeatedly sing something badly, in exactly the same way.


either way, that's more talent than i have! lol
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...and I wasn't remembering wrong, he wasn't double-tracking. He was singing each song no more than a handful of times, and Butch Vig was using those few tracks in the mix:

http://www.burntout.com/nirvana/articles/article5.html

Cobain's legendary impatience with multiple takes came to the fore at this time. "He really wanted to do everything on the first or second take," says Vig. "He'd do a couple of takes and say, 'That's it. I'm not gonna do it anymore.' The tricky part was t rying to figure out how to motivate him to give really good performances. Sometimes his first or second takes were brilliant, but sometimes they needed work. They needed to be more focused. What I ended up doing was recording everything he sang, even the warmups. A lot of times, I'd actually be going for a first take, but he would think it was just a warmup. Then I'd have the engineer flip to a new track and I'd tell Kurt, 'Okay, you're ready for your first take.' If I was lucky, I could get as many as fo ur takes out of him. Then I'd take the best pieces of each one and make a master out of it."
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http://www.livenirvana.com/documents/mojonevermind.html

"I found out right away that Kurt didn't like to sing a lot. I would record him warming up and if I was lucky I would get three more takes out of him. He likes to slur the words and sometimes it took me several passes to figure out what he was singing. But that's part of what made his singing special. He gave those words some magic, in that you don't always know what he was saying. I would then pick one as the best and then take certain bits from the other tracks. That was it. He was that good."
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RAMI said:
he can't sing.
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I stand corrected.

I don't know why I said that. He sings on key, he has a distinctive sound, it's a good rock voice, and I like a lot of his tunes.

I have no idea why my first impulse was to say he can't sing. It was a bad reflex. :o
 
Chibi Nappa said:
#1 - You're going to get in trouble for that link. I'd edit it if I were you.

#2 - Don't confuse hitting a pitch with being a great vocalist. The man was one of the greatest vocalists I've ever heard.

#3 - The panning on Nevermind is very common.
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I'm confused by number 2. U can hear vocal pitch adjustments on some of his acapellas. But he does have a cool voice.

I don't know how to edit the link. It keeps putting the URL links back up. Help me out with that one quick
 
I appreciate what you're doing here, but posting other people's copyrighted material is against the TOS. I removed the link.

Thanks for your understanding.
 
Chili said:
I appreciate what you're doing here, but posting other people's copyrighted material is against the TOS. I removed the link.

Thanks for your understanding.
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You're the POST NAZI!!!!!

:D:D:D
 
Thats cool, I thought I could get away with an acapella for educational purposes and tried not to label it as what it really was. Don't want to get the site in trouble.
 
Illogical_Mind said:
I'm confused by number 2. U can hear vocal pitch adjustments on some of his acapellas. But he does have a cool voice.
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Cobain died before pitch correction was invented. His vocals never even saw a computer. That was all tape.

And what I mean is that his inability to hit every note doesn't change the fact that he is one of the greatest singers ever. Nobody else can convey that emotion.
 
They could still do it manually when necessary. Its time consuming, but thats why producers and studio staff make that money
 
Illogical_Mind said:
They could still do it manually when necessary. Its time consuming, but thats why producers and studio staff make that money
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There were pitch shifters. All they did was shift the pitch a set amount with no regard to what the input signal actually contained.

Now imagine looking at a bit of tape (no visible wave forms on a computer monitor), scrubbing it back and forth over the play head looking for literally a tenth of a second, marking it somehow, rewinding, and waiting with your finger on the record button for the exact instant that mark hit the play head. It's not like you could just put the tape at the correct place and hit play. Those machines need a decent amount of length to get up to speed. And even if you did hit the timing correctly, the correction could only be an instant stair-step effect.

And if you fucked it up, you fucked it up. There was no undo.

No, there was no practical pitch correction at all back then.
 
RAMI said:
You're the POST NAZI!!!!!

:D:D:D
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Awww, shucks....

Illogical_Mind said:
Thats cool, I thought I could get away with an acapella for educational purposes and tried not to label it as what it really was. Don't want to get the site in trouble.
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I sent a note to the Admins asking for clarification. If they okay it, I can re-edit the post and put the link back up.

Thanks again,
 
Chibi Nappa said:
There were pitch shifters. All they did was shift the pitch a set amount with no regard to what the input signal actually contained.

Now imagine looking at a bit of tape (no visible wave forms on a computer monitor), scrubbing it back and forth over the play head looking for literally a tenth of a second, marking it somehow, rewinding, and waiting with your finger on the record button for the exact instant that mark hit the play head. It's not like you could just put the tape at the correct place and hit play. Those machines need a decent amount of length to get up to speed. And even if you did hit the timing correctly, the correction could only be an instant stair-step effect.

And if you fucked it up, you fucked it up. There was no undo.

No, there was no practical pitch correction at all back then.
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They had other pitch shifting tools back then. Didn't they load stuff into sampling keyboards and modulate them? For sure they did stuff like that, how else could they get Jimmy Buffet to sing in tune?
 
RAMI said:
Seriously??? I had no idea. I am hearing SOMETHING on that track, must be chorus or flange or something.
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I'm wondering if someone found and downloaded the raw vocal track, and then ran THAT through some plugins, just for kicks?

Chibi Nappa said:
The front of take 87 glued to the back of take 43.
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:agreed: If I had an infinite amount of patience, and infinitely understanding (or deaf) roommates, I could comp together a pretty mean vocal track with no pitch correction. I also can't sing to save my life. :D
 
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